The random musings of one of the guitarists of the band "Behind the Sun" touching on favorite gear, albums, songs, bands, and branching out into some baseball and basketball when absolutely necessary ...

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

TLV -> EWR -> IAD -> ICN -> TLV

I recently returned from a trip which started with a family vacation and continued to business-related travel in the far east. During the course of the trip I circled the globe from West to East which sounded easy enough, after all I just had to sit in my seat and let the pilots do the work. As it turned out my stay in Korea ran a little longer than planned but in the end I did make it back to base.

Now its time to dig in and finish arranging the 2nd BTS album. We've got 2 full demos recorded ("the Burning" and "Fire" two songs which we've played live already), another one in the process of being recorded ("Things fall apart"... ditto...), another 2 songs ready to record demos for, and a seemingly endless collection of riffs, lyrics, scraps, jams, songs in progress, and witty titles which we will now have to carve into another 5-10 solid tunes to put on this album.

Given that the cd is apparently dead [yet oddly enough, the LP is alive --- even Best Buy is selling vinyl these days] we've been throwing around a bunch of ideas as to what kind of weird formats we could or should release the 2nd album on: Vinyl? Disk on Key? mp3 only? cd? 8-track cassette? I'm personally torn between the reality that the only format where we are really selling our album is mp3s on iTunes and mp3 and flac on Bandcamp and the desire to have a tangible, physical piece of something with the cover art and credits slapped on it.

We're also at this time auditioning a few brilliant local guitarists for the role of lead guitar in the band. I'm very happy with a number of players whom we've seen so far and I hope that we can make a final decision in the next few weeks and then get into the rehearsal room as a 5 piece band and start perfecting all these songs we are sitting on. And of course, I've got a lot of cutting and pasting and riffing and tracking to do at home also to finish my portion of the whole thing and try and stitch it all together. Its time for the classic "scraping around on the floor" [as Robt. Fripp refers to it] phase of album writing ... something which I expect to take the rest of 2011, and we'll start tracking in 2012. That's the plan.